Grief is so incredibly selfish.
- 07/18, 5:25 PM
It's my narrative to own - my friend
- 07/18, ~10 PM
Best times during travel are when you have lulls between activity. Where you just sit down for a minute and enjoy all that is around you. In such moments, life cannot possibly be cruel. Wars cannot possibly be happening elsewhere. No one is going through a heartbreak. Is there a way to pause grief? Not just for self but for everyone. Imagine that! A moment of tranquil for all humans, even the damned.
- 07/19, 3 PM
Back home, everyone has fun while the father works. Here entire family works and no one has fun. My Lyft driver, a 40 yr old mother of 1 from Iran said that to me. She works 3 jobs to support her son. When I ask her how shes doing, her response is 'I am perfect.' We talk about our jobs. She says she's proud of me for being a successful single woman working in IT. She plays Samjhawan. We enjoy the song in silence. Once the song is over, she says 'ooof, this is beautiful.' It really is. She says, while driving on the Bay Bridge, every time I drive here, the view, the colors of the sky, everything always feels different. It's so beautiful always.
- 07/20, 1 PM
It's 3:30 AM PST which means it's 5:30 AM CST. I should be asleep as I have to wake up early tomorrow. But I have so many thoughts about this whole trip right now. There's self-worth associated with working a room in a social gathering. If you make things about yourself, you deem yourself worthy of it. If you don't, you don't deem yourself worthy of being the center of attention. It's an interesting idea. How, perhaps, in this lack of self worth there's also a sense of pride. I went to a hill today and saw Oakland and SF from the top. It was beautiful. I hung out with a variety of Muslims today too. They were very fascinating. There's an interesting demographic split between people who move to SF and those who have grown up there. I would not have considered there to be such boundaries. We hold on to geopolitical, social, etc. boundaries hoping to find people we click with. And yet, what is important beyond all that is whether your soul harmonizes with them. I feel peace. Even though my legs hurt from constant walking and my feet have blisters and I want to be in my home, in my bed, showered and asleep, I still find peace here in chaos of sleeping on couches and not knowing what your next hour looks like. I remember reading this quote that summarizes how I feel about this trip: Wherever you go in the midst of movement and activity, carry your stillness within you. Then the chaotic movement around you will never overshadow your access to the reservoir of creativity, the field of pure potentiality. I am the most creative when I am in midst of chaos - be it professionally driven or intellectual creativity. Perhaps it's time to reclaim the author in me.
- 07/22, 3:30 AM
I think I am learning to be more okay with distance and expectations. No false hopes about meeting people thus I live in the moment.
- 07/22, 12 PM
Everyone's taking pictures from their nice iPhone X cameras but there's no thought behind it that matters. - my friend R
12:30 PM, Oakland to SF
Being in love is so weird but coming out of love is weirder. There's a lot of vulnerability in being heartbroken. You learn a lot about self. You also learn to be extremely unapologetically selfish. It's an interesting paradigm. A part of you wants to be done with the process, another wishes to be in love again chasing the highs. I was at a friend's wedding this weekend. In one of the wedding speeches, there was advice about how you lose structure once you are done with school. And then it becomes imperative to maintain structure in your life even more. Perhaps I need to restructure my life.
- 07/22, 5:08 PM
I feel so wholesome about the friendships I have created. I am not the person to have a lot of friends. I am the kind to have a few friends who are there for you. I take my time gauging character. I allow experiences to build up and then I formulate an opinion. But I take a lot of pride in my opinions of people. I have faith in them. Perhaps that's why dating makes absolutely no sense to me. How can you gauge a person in the span of a few months. There is no basis for your judgments. People hide a lot out of self-preservation. You cannot know someone unless you have shared experiences with them.
- 07/22, 5:30 PM
